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Henry Louis Wallace

Henry Louis Wallace (1965- ), the Charlotte Strangler, was one of the most dangerous serial killers in America. For almost two whole years, from 1992 to 1994, he was on the loose killing women in the east part of Charlotte, North Carolina. He killed eleven young women in all, three of them in the last three days before they caught him.

His secret? Hekilled only black working-class women. He was able to kill seven of them before the police started to get serious about finding him!

Wallace seemed like such a nice man. Even his girlfriend was surprised when she found out he was the killer. His neighbours and those who knew him growing up were shocked.

Wallace had a crack habit. When he needed money, he would get himself alone with a young woman at her place and rob her.

But when he got there it would go beyond that: once she turned her back on him he would put his hands on her neck and force her to have sex with him. After that he would cut off her breathing completely, strangling her to death. Then he would rob the place and leave.

The women he killed (pictures, where I could find them, go above the name):

March 1990: Tashanda Bethea - a girl he once dated. Threw her body in a lake.

May 1992: Sharon Lavette Nance – a prostitute. Instead of paying her he beat her to death.

June 1992: Caroline Love – after throwing her body in the woods, he helped her sisters file a missing person’s report. She went missing for two years.

February 1993: Shawna D. Hawk – found naked in her bathtub, her eyes looking up lifelessly through the water.

June 1993: Audrey Ann Spain

August 1993: Valencia M. Jumper – a friend of his sister’s. He strangled her and set her on fire. Later he went to the funeral.

September 1993: Michelle Stinson – found by her three-year-old son “sleeping on the floor” in her own blood with a knife in her back.

February 1994: Vanessa Little Mack – a sister of an old girlfriend of his.

Love, Baucum and Slaughter worked at Bojangles on Central Avenue with his girlfriend.

Spain and Hawk worked for him at Taco Bell. Stinson met him there.

Henderson worked with him at the Golden Corral.

The morning after Slaughter turned up dead the police compared notes. The same name kept coming up: Henry Louis Wallace. Not as the killer but as someone the last three women all knew. They found out he knew the other women too – and that it was his fingerprints that were on the back of Baucum’s Pulsar, the car they knew the killer had driven.

They arrested Wallace and questioned him for hours. At last he broke and deep into the night he told them about each of the eleven murders.

He is now in prison sentenced to die, but no date has been set. He still has some more appeals he can make in the courts.

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Thank you Abagond for writing this beautiful article on the victims of HW. This should be a wake-up call to Americans who value one segment of womanhood while neglecting the rest. We all hear are read stories of Natalee Holloway, Laci Peterson, the victims of serial killers Ted Bundy, David Horowitz(Son of Sam), and Joel Rifkin, Bonnie Lee Bakley, Jennifer Levin, Chandra Levy, Nixzmary Brown. But what about the victims of Henry Louis Wallace, Latoyia Figueroa, Reyna Marroquin, Latasha Norman, Sherrice Iverson? Don’t Black victims count too?

All too often, American society doesn’t give two cent for Black women and their lives.

This article goes a long way in saying that these women’s deaths are not in vain. That we still remember them.

HW problems came long before crack. He had some problems with his relationships with women, although he’s always with a girlfriend or wife. He told a psychiatric/author Faye Sultan that his mother is sadistic disciplinarian who beat him up at minor mistakes, that he was exposed to porn and sex at a young age. His father disowned him even before he was born and all his life he wanted to know his father but his mother refused all contact with his father.

Here’s a list from trial transcript:

The trial court submitted 40 mitigating circumstances to the jurors for each of the nine counts of first-degree murder. One or more jurors found the following 25 mitigating circumstances for all nine murders:

Henry Wallace was under the influence of a mental or emotional disturbance at the time of this crime.

Henry Wallace was the second child born to an unwed mother who had been orphaned at 13, sexually assaulted and emotionally abused.

Henry Wallace’s father rejected him before birth, declaring him to be a “mistake” and abandoned his mother, never providing any financial or other support for his family.

Henry Wallace’s father never saw Henry Wallace during his life, never visited Henry Wallace during his life, and rejected him throughout his life.

Henry Wallace was raised fatherless in a cinder block shack without indoor plumbing.

While he was still young, Henry Wallace was an object of ridicule in his family and in his neighborhood.

When he was still young, Henry Wallace was molested by older girls in his neighborhood.

Henry Wallace was exposed to sexual violence from an early age.

When he was still young, Henry Wallace witnessed a “gang rape” of another neighborhood girl.

When he was still young, Henry Wallace was exposed to magazines that featured articles and pictures describing or depicting pornography, rape and sexual violence against women.

When he was still young, Henry Wallace was told in detail about the rape and strangulation of a woman in his neighborhood.

Henry Wallace was exposed to violence from an early age.

Throughout Henry Wallace’s childhood, his mother inflicted beatings on him that went beyond normal strict parental discipline and spanking, often using objects to beat him with or directing Henry and his sister to beat each other.

Henry Wallace was raised in an emotionally abusive environment.

Henry Wallace’s mother often called him “stupid,” “clumsy,” and degraded him. She further degraded his girlfriends and routinely deprived him of his privacy by searching his room, wallet, belongings and, even in adulthood, his car.

Henry Wallace began exhibiting psychological and emotional problems in his early teenage years.

Within a month of his discharge from active duty, Henry Wallace’s marriage dissolved and in January 1989, he separated from his wife and was forced to move back to his mother’s home.

Following his discharge from active duty and separation from his wife, Henry Wallace began to experience increasing mental, emotional and psychological problems.

From January 1989 until his arrest on March 12, 1994, Henry Wallace’s life was a downward spiral of increasing psychological, mental, and emotional problems, drug use, marginal employment and unemployment.

Yes, that man did went to the funerals of Shawna Hawk, Valencia Jumper, and Vanessa Mack. He had the audacity to file a missing persons’ report on Caroline Love, then went out searching for her along with members of her family back in 1992(reminds me of how the boyfriend of Latoyia Figueroa went on a search mission to find her days after she was reported missing by her father’s family). Shed fake tears at the deaths of Betty Baucum and Brandi Henderson as soon as their bodies were found at the same apartment complex. Here’s an excerpt from the March 1994 article “Just A Charmer”:

“The morning after Sumpter issued her plea, Vanessa Little Mack was found strangled in her bedroom, the eighth of Wallace’s alleged victims. Sumpter believes Mack was killed a year to the day after Shawna Hawk was murdered.

‘Brandi was murdered’

Two days before Wallace’s March 13 arrest, Khevin Sherrill stopped by a Fast Fare. As he left the store, he saw Wallace in the parking lot. He looked panicked.

“Khevin, did you hear the news?” Wallace asked him.

“What news?” Sherrill replied.

“Someone told me Brandi was murdered.”

They hurried over to Sherrill’s house to watch the 5 o’clock news. Sure enough, Brandi June Henderson had been strangled in her apartment.

They showed her picture on television, read her name, said she was the 18-year-old mother of a 10-month-old baby boy. They showed a picture of little Tareese, who had been choked in the attack but survived.

Henderson and Tareese lived with Berness Lamar “Squeaky” Woods, the baby’s father. Woods found Henderson’s body on March 9, when he came home from his second-shift job at a nearby restaurant.

Woods, Wallace and Sherrill had met while working at a nearby Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. Wallace and Woods were good friends, Sherrill said.

Wallace seemed so concerned about Henderson’s murder, Sherrill said. After they watched the news, the first thing Wallace wanted to do was call Squeaky to make sure he was OK.

Wallace was very considerate to women. Friends remembered how he would offer to do the dishes and help with other domestic chores. He liked to cradle one neighbor’s baby in his arms. The mother called him “Uncle Henry.”

But easygoing Henry had also been using drugs — not often, friends say, but enough to alarm his girlfriend, who threw him out about a month ago after discovering he had been smoking crack.

That’s when his world really seemed to fall apart.

“Since she’s been gone, he’s been on a rampage,” Eaddy says.

He left his job at the Black-eyed Pea restaurant. He sold everything in his apartment. And in the week before his arrest, he stopped changing his clothes.

Still, Wallace’s friends had no clue that he might be a killer — even in that last week, even after two bodies turned up in two days within a few blocks of his house. Wallace looked desperate and strange, but they chalked that up to all the crack he’d been smoking.

Even strung out, friends say, Wallace remained considerate and polite, especially with his female friends. Two days before his arrest, Wallace stopped by to visit Anita Ramirez, who lived in an apartment just across from his old place.

This was the same day Betty Jean Baucum’s body was discovered, and one day after Brandi June Henderson’s body was found. Both women were murdered at The Lake, an apartment complex a short walk from Ramirez’s apartment.

Ramirez didn’t suspect a thing. She served Wallace a bowl of menudo, a traditional Mexican soup, which he ate while they watched Oprah on TV.

Terrell Smith, another of Wallace’s old neighbors, didn’t suspect anything, either. “How the hell are we supposed to recognize a serial killer?” he asks. “I’d never been around one before.”

The day before his arrest, Wallace stopped by to visit Larry Spencer and Devin Johnson, who live just across from his old apartment. They watched some pro wrestling, then took in an episode of “Kung Fu.”

Wallace was distraught. He missed his girlfriend, and the crack was tearing him up. Spencer told him he needed to get away, relax awhile, get his head together.

As he sat there munching on leftover pepperoni pizza, Wallace called the Greyhound station to see what time the buses were leaving. He wanted to visit his mom.

Spencer offered to give him a ride to the bus station. Wallace thanked him over and over again. “Everybody else has turned their back on me,” Spencer remembers him saying.

Before he left the apartment that morning, Wallace talked to his girlfriend on the telephone. He begged her to take him back. When she refused, he stood there in the kitchen, leaning against the refrigerator, crying.

One day later, when the news broke that Wallace had been charged with 10 murders, his neighbors were floored.

Denise Spencer suddenly remembered an incident from the week before, when she had pushed Henry in the chest, just joking around. Henry, usually so calm and friendly, had grabbed her arm and squeezed it so hard he left white marks on her flesh.

Thinking about that now made Spencer’s skin crawl. She ran to the bathroom and scrubbed her arm. She had trusted this Henry Wallace.

“It’s a trip,” she says. “I liked Henry.”

Now Wallace’s neighbors are thinking of writing a book: “Henry, The Guy We Thought We Knew.”

In school, he was popular enough to win election to the student council, and brainy enough to take college-prep courses. Friends say he was also an exceptionally smooth talker — a gift that later made him successful as the teen radio disc jockey “Night Rider” on Barnwell station WBAW-FM.

It also made him popular with women.

“He was a lover,” said Janice, a counter worker at an Allendale fast-food store, who Wallace frequently asked out on dates.

“He was very sweet — the kind of guy you’d want to date,” said the woman, who declined to give her last name. “He was always offering to take you places, or to show you around the radio station.”

The smooth Casanova with the sexy voice and disarming smile — that’s how she would remember Henry Wallace, right up to the day she saw his face on TV, next to the long list of his alleged victims.

“I was shocked,” she said.

Yvonne Wallace says she had no inkling of the slayings until last Sunday, when she returned home to a lawn filled with news reporters asking questions about her brother.

That same night, Yvonne herself faced tough questions from a friend whose sister had been one of Henry Wallace’s alleged victims. The woman wanted to know why her sister had been killed. Then, her voice breaking, she demanded to know how Henry could have the audacity to play mourner at Valencia Jumper’s funeral. Yvonne, who also went to the service, had no answers.

“When Valencia died, Henry sent flowers and called the parents to console them,” Yvonne said. “He even called me, all upset and crying about Valencia’s death … ”

Sally Miller is certain she saw Wallace at Vanessa Mack’s funeral last month. She realized it the minute she saw his mugshot on TV. He had the same eyes, the same hoop earring.

She’d had such a strange feeling the day of the funeral. She felt so upset, she left before Vanessa Mack’s wake was over and before her funeral had even started. Mack was the eighth of Wallace’s alleged victims.

“I’m sure it was him,” Miller says. “And it’s because of that feeling I had. It was an eerie feeling. It was really spooky.”

Miller, a member of the support group Mothers of Murdered Offspring, had gone to the wake to lead a candlelight vigil and decry the violence that has cut short so many young lives. Her 13-year-old son was killed in a drive-by shooting, gunned down as he stepped onto his front porch.

Miller couldn’t even finish her presentation at Mack’s funeral. She rushed to her car and headed back to Charlotte, crying all the way home.

Sam Jordan, Shawna Hawk’s godfather, is convinced he saw Wallace at her viewing one year before Mack was laid to rest. As mourners filed by Hawk’s open casket, Wallace sat all alone at the back of the room with a strange look on his face, just staring, Jordan says. Hawk was the fourth of Wallace’s alleged victims. Thinking of him at her wake makes Jordan shudder.

Jordan loved Shawna like a daughter. “Oh man, she was my heart,” he says. “She was my baby girl.”

It enrages him to think of how police let Wallace slip through their hands time after time. There he was, arrested in South Carolina on charges of raping a woman at gunpoint, and the judge let him walk without bail. ”

They never made this into a book because the book companies didn’t think books on Black serial killers would sell. Yet, I see tons of books on nonblack serial killer on the shelves every year. Joel Rifkin had four books written about him from 1993-2001. Why? He’s a middle class white man from L.I. who preyed on nonblack prostitutes from 1989-1993. Whereas the victims of HW were decent young Black women from East Charlotte.

This one should have been made into a book. I’m contemplating about writing one on HW. I just need more time.

Here’s an old article on why Black serial killers and their victims don’t get any press from the media:

A forgotten tragedy,’ 10 long hard years later Black serial killers — and their victims — often ignored by media

TONYA JAMESON

Shawna Hawk would have been 31 in December. She wanted to be a paralegal. She wanted a child, but wasn’t sure about marriage.

Henry Louis Wallace ended those plans when he strangled Hawk on Feb. 19, 1993, in her Charlotte home.

He also confessed, in 1994, to beating Sharon Nance to death, stabbing Michelle Stinson to death, killing Caroline Love and strangling Audrey Spain, Valencia Jumper, Vanessa Mack, Brandi Henderson, Betty Baucum and Debra Slaughter. Wallace was convicted of nine murders and sentenced to death. The New York Times recently listed Wallace, now 35, among the country’s most notorious serial killers of the last 25 years. But few outside Charlotte know of him. He’s a black man who preyed on black women.

Movies aren’t made about black serial killers — or their victims.

“It’s like the forgotten tragedy,” said Dee Sumpter, Hawk’s mom.

Despite studies showing about 22 percent of serial killers are black, most Americans, including too many in law enforcement, cling to the stereotype of the crazy white serial killer: Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson.

The Lemonheads and Guns ‘N Roses sang Charles Manson’s lyrics. The band Marilyn Manson combines the names of two dark pop-culture icons: the serial killer’s and Marilyn Monroe’s.

Korn front man Jonathan Davis has a serial killer collection, including Bundy’s car and Gacy’s clown suits. Gacy’s paintings have sold for as much as $20,000. Producer Spike Lee released “Summer of Sam,” loosely based on Berkowitz’s killings, in 1999.

Fanaticism over these serial killers deifies the murderers and reaffirms the serial-killer stereotype.

The recent arrest of Derrick Lee Todd, who’s suspected of killing at least five women in southern Louisiana, and last year’s arrest of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, the Beltway sniper suspects, are grim reminders that mass murderers can come in all hues.

Considering the randomness and brazenness of the sniper shootings, movies and books will inevitably chronicle that case and help shatter the racial stereotype. But Wallace’s victims likely will remain footnotes in high-profile cases like that. Those Charlotte women deserve more.

Much has happened in the past decade. Debra Slaughter’s and Audrey Spain’s fathers died. Some families turned to drug and alcohol abuse to cope with the slayings. Sumpter, a receptionist, courted suicide by relying on prescription drugs for four years after Hawk’s death.

Sumpter also started Mothers of Murdered Offspring to make sure the women are remembered.

“Putting a face to murder is asking people not to tuck us away and forget about us,” said Sumpter, who still has flashbacks of finding her daughter dead in the bathtub.

I grew in the town where Henry Wallace grew up. I remember when he was suspected of killing Tashanda Bethae, a local girl from Barnwell, SC. This girl was a young vibrant girl, who was killed and thrown in a creek. This did not get much press, it was just a black girl. Local law enforcement never solved this killing, although everybody suspected HW. All of these things that they say HW was exposed to early in his childhood is crap. We all know, if these young women had been white, the whole town would have been shut down, until it was solved. I think that we have to take a good look at our society, when 11 black women can be killed and their killer is allowed to have appeal after appeal, oh yeah and also allowed to be married while in prison to a prison employee at that. He should have been put to death a long time ago, what is he still appealing he confessed to killing these girls. Lets wake up and fry his ass.

You ain’t never lied. This is why the story of the victims of HW need to be told because this is an example of the less value given to Black lives as opposed to all others, especially the lives of young Black women in America.

By the way, do you have any clippings of the photos of Miss Bethea and where is she buried? The reason I asked for this is because I’m working on the memorials for all the victims of HW.

Mike said in his previous post:
“We all know, if these young women had been white, the whole town would have been shut down, until it was solved. I think that we have to take a good look at our society, when 11 black women can be killed and their killer is allowed to have appeal after appeal, oh yeah and also allowed to be married while in prison to a prison employee at that. He should have been put to death a long time ago, what is he still appealing he confessed to killing these girls. Lets wake up and fry his ass.”- Mike

That’s so true. That the police and authorities in Barnwell basically gave him a free pass to do whatever as long as his victims are not nonblack. That’s the saddest part of all. I hope the state fry him soon and not give in to his numerous appeals. He’s been in prison long enough.

Marsha Brown hardly noticed when a message from the Charlotte police flashed across her screen at the Barnwell County Sheriff’s Department last Sunday. It was a crime bulletin about a man accused of serial murders in Charlotte. The name at the end of the message caught her eye. Henry Wallace, it read. Brown, a Sheriff’s Department dispatcher, thought, “This can’t be true.” The Henry Wallace she knew, a close friend for years, was as gentle as a lamb. She hurriedly picked up the telephone and dialed Wallace’s cousin, asking for Henry’s birth date. When his cousin told her, Nov. 4, 1965, same as on the computer, Brown sat silent. The news spread quickly across Barnwell. The 28-year-old man many people knew as the charming second-born of Lottie Wallace had been accused of strangling 10 women in Charlotte. In North Carolina, the emerging picture of Henry Wallace was far different from the one Brown had in her head. Police and family members of the women he had confessed to killing saw a monster, a bug-eyed crack addict who befriended young women, then choked the breath out of them with his broad shoulders and strong hands. It wasn’t the Henry Wallace that Brown and hundreds of others in Barnwell had grown up with, seen in his high school cheerleading sweater or heard on the radio as the popular DJ “The Night Rider.” It wasn’t the Henry Wallace who had sent his third-grade teacher a Mother’s Day card when he was thousands of miles away on a Navy ship. Said the mother of a close friend from high school, pained by the news of Wallace’s arrest: “We got boogers walking down the street you would expect this of. But not Henry. I would have trusted him with my daughter anywhere.”

The boy next door Henry Wallace grew up like most kids in Barnwell. The second child of a tireless textile employee, he played youth sports and enjoyed the cozy, small- town ways of a friendly place. His mother, known to many in the town of 6,000 as Lottie Mae, told friends she wanted to make a better life for her two children. By the time he got to high school, Wallace was one of the most popular kids on campus. As a senior, he was a member of the student council and had even joined the cheerleading squad as its only boy. His senior year, Wallace was elected captain and in school pictures he looks doe-eyed and innocent, which is pretty much the way classmates remember him. Few at Barnwell High want to talk about Wallace now, but Principal Phil Flynn said he was a good student who worked hard to become part of the student body and was admired by classmates. Brown described his popularity this way: “You remember how people look at the captain of the football team? That’s what he was like,” she said. Marbea Nix, a 1982 graduate of Barnwell High School, had known him since first grade. She remembers him the way most people in Barnwell who knew him do — friendly, cheerful, bright and exceptionally well-mannered. She thought it a little strange that he was the only boy cheerleader at the school, a perennial powerhouse in football and baseball. “It was kind of odd,” Nix said of his cheerleading, but few gave it a second thought in 1983, when the energetic Wallace earned his diploma. One of the first people he impressed was Bobby Nichols, sales manager and afternoon air personality at WBAW-FM in Barnwell. Wallace had started working at the station his senior year in high school, after impressing Nichols one day. “He walked in here and said, ‘I’m Henry Wallace. I love your show, and I would like to work for you.’ ” Nichols was so impressed by Wallace that he would let him borrow his car to run errands. Wallace had a way of making whatever he was talking about sound interesting, and he was great at mimicking singers, especially rap artists. Nichols eventually hired him as a weekend disc jockey in 1988, when Wallace returned to Barnwell after four years in the Navy. “Henry was the boy next door,” Nichols said.

The first clues Nichols and others in Barnwell thought the Navy would be good for Wallace. When he came back in 1988, Wallace was stocky and self-assured, pretty much the same guy who had women falling all over him when he left. Few knew, however, that in the service he had been arrested in January 1988 in Bremerton, Wash., charged with trying to steal a VCR, TV and microwave.

Shortly after Wallace returned to Barnwell, he began leaving clues, not obvious at first, that something was wrong. Nichols said the station had to ask Nichols to leave in 1989 when tapes and other equipment began turning up missing. He and station manager Drew Wilder suspected Wallace had taken them, but couldn’t prove it. Both Nichols and Wilder remember Wallace didn’t seem the least bit upset when they confronted him about the tapes and let him go. Wallace found other jobs easily, winning employers over with his clean-cut looks and gentle smile. Nichols remembers how Henry just walked into Sandoz Chemical Co. in Barnwell County and got a job at the popular plant, which regularly turned away hundreds of applicants. “He was smooth,” Nichols said. “Charming.” After Wallace became the prime suspect in a February 1991 burglary at Barnwell High School, he convinced Nichols that he was not the one who had broken into the gymnasium and taken a $1,100 camcorder. Wallace was eventually convicted of the crime, after he tried to sell some items stolen from the school to a Barnwell pawnshop. Nichols had always thought Wallace was destined to do very good things with his life. But after he heard about the pawnshop and the arrest, he “lost faith in Henry’s smartness.”

Trading on reputation Marsha Brown didn’t think much about the burglary charges. She and Wallace had been as close as brother and sister after high school, and despite his scrapes with the law he seemed to be the same friendly guy. One thing about him did strike others as unusual. Wallace, who had once ballooned to 251 pounds on his 6-foot, 1-inch frame, seemed to gain and lose weight in furious cycles after he came back from the Navy. The break-in, however, was part of an emerging pattern Wallace carefully guarded from his friends, and even from his mother. In March 1990, about a year before the burglary at Barnwell High School, a good friend of Brown’s, 18-year-old Tashanda Bethea, disappeared. On April 1, two weeks after she was reported missing, her body was found at Anderson’s Pond, a scenic spot a few miles northwest of Barnwell. What many people in Barnwell didn’t know at the time was that Wallace was the prime suspect. The Barnwell County Sheriff’s Department interrogated Wallace in Allendale, where he was being held in connection with the attempted rape of another Barnwell woman, 16-year-old Eartha Brown. Wallace had picked up Brown, an acquaintance from childhood, for a date one night in March 1990 and took her to an Allendale motel, where he told her he was going to steal some TVs, she said. Once inside the motel, Brown said, Wallace grabbed her and tried to rip her clothes off. When she resisted, he put a pistol to her head and said he was going to kill her, “just like he did Shan,” as Tashanda Bethea was known to her friends. When Brown screamed, he left the motel and drove her home. Eartha Brown said earlier this week that she was so scared of Wallace she never mentioned to anyone else what he had said about killing Bethea. Wallace spent only eight days in an Allendale jail on the attempted rape charge. He entered a pretrial intervention program for nonviolent offenders, which he never completed. After Wallace was released, Eartha Brown said, he began driving by a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant where she worked and would glare at her. She said Lottie Wallace visited her, too, and “cussed her out” for accusing her son of rape. Brown said prosecutors never told her or her mother that Wallace would enter the nonviolent offenders program instead of going to prison. Unlike many others in Barnwell, Brown said she is not surprised that Wallace has admitted killing 11 women. One of the few others who was not surprised is Barnwell County Sheriff Joey Zorn, who believed four years ago that Wallace had killed Bethea. But even after an intense interrogation, he said, Wallace would not crack. There were no witnesses who could place her in his car the night she was killed, and there was no physical evidence. During an interview with Wallace in Charlotte this week, Zorn said, he learned how clever Wallace had been. After choking Bethea and slashing her wrists and throat, Wallace told the sheriff, he washed the inside and outside of his car so completely that SLED investigators who examined his car could find no trace of Bethea.

Con man rides system Wallace was not done skating past the criminal justice system in South Carolina after eluding arrest in the Bethea case and escaping jail for trying to rape Brown in 1990. After serving 3 1/2 months in an Allendale prison on separate breaking- and-entering charges in Barnwell and Allendale in 1991, he moved to Rock Hill to live with his sister, Yvonne. On Feb. 25, 1992, a few months after he moved to Charlotte, he was charged with raping and kidnapping 17-year-old Keeber Lewis at gunpoint in York County. Despite his growing criminal record, Wallace was released on his own recognizance, and York County officials somehow lost track of him. In May 1992, Charlotte police discovered the body of Sharon Lovette Nance, the first of 10 women Wallace has admitted strangling. By the time Debra Ann Slaughter was choked to death on March 12 of this year, Wallace had already been arrested five times for burglary, grand larceny, attempted rape and shoplifting, had violated parole and had tested positive for cocaine. But he had spent little more than three months in jail. As relatives of the victims and others point fingers at various law enforcement agencies, some in Barnwell see a different side of the story.

Nichols said he believes that Wallace was such a skillful con man that he was able to trade on his reputation for years, even after it became apparent that he was troubled and violent. He was kind of like Raskolnikov, the main character in the novel “Crime and Punishment.” He didn’t look or act like a criminal. Many in town knew his sister as an honor student who studied hard and went to college. And his mother was a kind of blue-collar heroine. Even after Wallace got in trouble with the law, he continued to work as a disc jockey at youth clubs in Barnwell County, and women still found his bubbly personality attractive. “He was nice and polite and he was getting away with small stuff,” Nichols said, theorizing that Wallace gained confidence after it was clear he could convince people he was not a bad person. “You could look him in the eye and you would say, ‘Yeah, I believe you.’ If they put him to a lie detector test, he would pass it,” Nichols said. Marsha Brown, his longtime friend, got only one tiny clue that something was different about him in recent months. It came this past December, when he was back from Charlotte visiting at Christmas. She spotted him in Wal-Mart. “He hadn’t stopped by or called me, and that was the first time that had ever happened,” Brown said. “I said to him playfully, ‘Leave me alone.’ ”

Caption:

1. Marsha Brown holds a photo of Tashanda Bethea, who disappeared in March 1990. What many people didn’t know at the time was that her friend Henry Wallace was the prime suspect. 2. Bethea’s body was found in Anderson’s Pond spillway, outside Barnwell, in April 1990. Photos by Pam Royal / The State

Very beautiful, vivacious, sweet, and virtuous as well,Betty Jean was affectionately known by family and friends as “Suzie”. Very angelic in appearance, her relatives described her as a quiet young woman with a very lovely smile. One young lady said of Betty that she was “She was one of the nicest people you would ever come across.”

Unfortunately, this promising young woman’s life was senselessly taken by violence, from a serial killer who use charm to betray this angelica’s innocence and sweetness on March 9, 1994, as he had done with ten other attractive young Black women from 1990-1994. The angelico princesa Betty Jean was given a very honorable funeral a week after her body was found in March 10, 1994. She had a lovely daughter, Betty Jean, whom she loved dearly. The mother and daughter share the same birthdate, March 7th.

Let us remember the Angelico princesa Betty Jean as the sweetest flower and may this innocent young woman rest in peace.
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LAUREL HILL — Betty Jean “Suzie” Baucom was never late for work.When she didn’t show up for her job as manager of a Bojangles restaurant in Charlotte last Thursday, her co-workers began to worry. Baucom’s mother in Laurel Hill called her daughter in Charlotte but got no answer. Friends knocked on her door at The Lake apartment complex on Albermarle Road, but no one answered. At 10 a.m. on March 10, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police found Baucom, 24, dead on the floor of her bedroom. Police said she was one of 10 victims of Henry Louis Wallace. Wallace, 28, was charged Sunday in Baucom’s death and in the deaths of nine other east Charlotte women. Wallace was a crack addict who worked in numerous fast-food restaurants in east Charlotte, police said. Wallace knew his victims and strangled them when they let him into their homes, police said. This week, Wallace was linked to the slayings of four other women — three in Charlotte and one in his hometown of Barnwell, S.C. Baucom knew Wallace because his former girlfriend worked at the restaurant, a co-worker said Wednesday. Wallace robbed Baucom’s apartment and stole her 1988 Nissan Pulsar, according to her mother, Betty Jean White. The car was found in the apartment complex parking lot the day after Baucom’s murder, police said. Another woman Wallace is accused of killing lived in Baucom’s apartment complex. Police said Brandi June Henderson, 18, was found strangled the evening of March 9. Henderson’s 10-month-old son was choked but is alive, police said. Baucom, a Laurel Hill native, had been in Charlotte for six months when she died, White said. Baucom, whom relatives described as a quiet young woman with a ready smile, was a 1989 graduate of Scotland High School and attended Richmond Community College. She moved to the city so she could better provide for her 3-year-old daughter, B.J., whom Baucom adopted from a relative, White said. White said her daughter was working more than 50 hours a week trying to save money so she could attend college in the fall. Jeff Ellis was one of the first people Baucom met when she began working at the Bojangles restaurant on Central Avenue in Charlotte. He and Baucom began their manager-training together and then worked side-by-side almost every day for the past few months. “She was one of the nicest people you would ever come across,” Ellis said. Ellis said the restaurant will be closed today so co-workers can attend Baucom’s funeral at St. Mary AME Zion Church in Laurel Hill. It was Ellis who called White in Laurel Hill when Baucom didn’t show up for work on March 10. “We knew that something was wrong,” he said. White went to Charlotte with B.J. on March 7 to see Baucom on her 24th birthday. White returned to Laurel Hill on March 8 and spoke to her daughter by phone. On March 9, White tried to call Baucom but received no answer. Her daughter’s answering machine was not on, which was unusual, White said. Police later told White that the answering machine was one of the items Wallace stole, as well as Baucom’s television, videocassette recorder and gun. White said she had encouraged her daughter to buy the gun when her roommate moved out. Baucom was going to get a one-bedroom apartment in another complex in April, her mother said.
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Brandi J. Henderson

‘Living in some terrible times’ One of 10 victims of an alleged serial killer is buried

Author: BEN STOCKING; STAFF WRITER

March 16, 1994CHARLOTTE —

Mourners gathered at the Macedonia Baptist Church on Monday to say goodbye to Brandi June Henderson — and to condemn the violence that claimed her life just 10 months after she became a mother. Henderson, 18, was one of 10 victims police say died at the hands of a killer who had been stalking Charlotte women for nearly two years. Her boyfriend found her strangled at her apartment Wednesday night. Their 10-month-old son also was choked but survived.

“I cry over my daughter,” said Debora Childers, Henderson’s mother, as mourners entered the church. But Childers said she would never cry for Henry Louis Wallace, the man accused of killing her daughter. She took solace in knowing that her daughter’s death had helped police make an arrest. Paying their final respects, friends and family filed past Henderson’s open coffin, a white casket adorned with pink and white flowers. “We are living in some terrible times,” said the Rev. John H. Walker, decrying the violence that cut short Henderson’s life. “We are living in some troubled times where the value of a human life is too low.” Henderson, her boyfriend Lamar Woods and their son Tareese Woods shared an apartment at The Lake, a complex near Wallace’s last apartment and the Bojangles’ restaurant where three more of his alleged victims worked.

Friends and family recalled Henderson as a warm, loving woman. “She was full of life,” said Joann Hite, the victim’s cousin. “She was friendly with everybody. She loved people.” Tareese was released from the hospital on the same day his mother was laid to rest. Woods, who works at two fast-food restaurants, said he plans to raise the child himself. Woods and Henderson had been a couple for two years. “She was a wonderful person,” Woods said, holding Tareese in his arms at the church. One day after Henderson was killed, the body of another woman was found in an apartment at the same housing complex. Police say the woman, Betty Jean Baucum, was Wallace’s ninth victim. Cheryl Julian, who lived across from Henderson’s apartment at The Lake, chatted with Henderson several times when they bumped into each other in the parking lot. “She was very sweet,” Julian said. “She had so much life ahead of her.” Addressing mourners at the funeral, Sally Miller echoed Julian’s lament. “This young lady’s life was just beginning,” Miller said. “This young lady should still be here to raise her baby, to walk in the park.” Miller, whose 13-year-old son was killed in a drive-by shooting, spoke on behalf of a group called Mothers of Murdered Offspring.

The organization was founded last year after the slaying of Shawna D. Hawk, another of Wallace’s alleged victims. “Let this light burn,” Miller said. “Remember your daughter.”

Many would remember Shawna Denise Hawk as a murder victim of Henry Louis Wallace, but few remember her as a very beautiful, smart and virtuous young woman. She was the second child and only daughter of Dee Sumpter and Walter Hawk II. She grew up to become a very beautiful, sweet, gentle, shy, saintly young woman with so much to offer. She and her beautiful mother are very tight with each other, for Shawna share her mother’s petite stature, very smooth skin, and very sparkling bright eyes. The ladies have a lot in common.

Miss Shawna wanted to be a paralegal. She also want to have a child as well. Her ambitions were cut short by someone she knew and trust. His name is the nortorious serial killer Henry Louis Wallace. He was once her boss at Taco Bell in East Charlotte, where she worked. He betrayed her trust and kindness by killing her,then have the audacity to attend her funeral like nothing ever happened. Then several months later, Mr. Wallace came upon Ms. Sumpter and said to her how much he missed her and that he was “sorry” to hear about her death. He behaved in a “gentlemanly” manner but unbeknownest to her, that man has a very evil side that he reveal to his victims when they are alone. A month after Shawna’s death and funeral, she and her best friend who was also Shawna’s godmother started a victims’ rights support group known as Mothers of Murdered Offspring.

For those who want to pay tribute to Shawna, please go to my two sponsor pages I created in her memory at:

When Sharon Nance left her aunt’s house in May 1992, she wore a black dress and talked about going out with friends. When she didn’t return and didn’t call, aunt Linda Nance knew something was wrong. But it wasn’t until a week later, when TV reports showed police finding a woman’s body in a black dress, that the family knew how bad it was. She had been beaten and left beside Rozzelle’s Ferry Road. For almost two years the Nance family struggled with a mysterious, violent end to a troubled life. This week police said Nance was a victim of Henry Louis Wallace. Her family knew her as a sweet woman who drew, wrote poetry and loved her son. “Whatever she could do for somebody, she would do it,” said Linda Nance. Relatives say she fell in with a bad crowd, started using drugs and got into trouble. Police records show she faced 61 charges between 1975 and 1992, including minor traffic offenses, assault, drug and weapon charges. She had recently been released from prison before she died, police said. On Monday, the family was glad the killer had been caught, puzzled about how Nance encountered Wallace, and angry that her legal troubles were being dredged up. “Regardless of what she had ever done, she was the best person I ever knew,” said sister Doris Nance.

* June 15, 1992 Caroline Love 20

Whenever Bojangles’ manager Terry Bizakis was working the night shift, he’d try to schedule Caroline Love to work, too. “She did her job – never gave me any problems,” says Bizakis, now an area manager for the fast-food chain. “She could stretch out and pick up a little extra and never really complain about it.” Love was hired as a cashier at the Central Avenue Bojangles’ in September 1989 and worked there until June 15, 1992. She finished her shift that day and, just after midnight, began walking home to her Darby Terrace apartment on Central Avenue, six blocks away. Her sister, Kathy Love, who also worked for Bojangles’, reported her missing the following day. In her quiet way, Love was a character, says Bizakis. She’d stroll into work every day with her headset playing her favorite rap music. “And there was no way you were going to get her into that restaurant on her day off. You had to get her before her hair appointment,” says Bizakis. “She’d spend four or five hours getting it done and you never knew what to expect.” What Bizakis liked about her best, he says, was that she was always on time, even though she was going to school, too. “She had good work ethics. Everybody liked her.” ”Caroline was a real sweet kid. A steady, all-around good person and employee.”

* Shawna D. Hawk Age: 20 Found: Feb 19, 1993

On the way to the Junior Prom, Shawna Hawk’s date told her she didn’t need the fake fingernails. So, all dressed up in the fanciest clothes she’d ever worn, Hawk peeled off the nails and tossed them out the window of her date’s Mercedes and onto Independence Boulevard. “That was the epitome of Shawna,” says her mother, Dee Sumpter. “She was herself. Unpretentious.” Sumpter found her daughter strangled, in a bathtub full of water at their home on Elon Street more than a year ago. Hawk was working at the Taco Bell at 3612 N. Sharon Amity Rd. She had been hired by Henry Louis Wallace, who police charged with murdering her and nine other women. Hawk also was a student at Central Piedmont Community College, studying to become a paralegal. She had worked part-time to help pay the family bills from the time she was 14, lying about her age to get a hired at McDonald’s. “This kid would bring her entire check to me and say, Mommy, here it is for meals.’ The entire check – from the time she was 15,” says Sumpter. She graduated from East Mecklenburg High School in 1991 where she was just a shy, unassuming student, who wasn’t involved in student activities, her mother says. “She was just a basic, everyday good kid.”

* June 25, 1993 Audrey Ann Spain Age 24

Audrey Spain grew up in a tiny coastal town in South Carolina, and her parents hated seeing her move to the big city. But Spain hoped to find a job working with computers in Charlotte. She came here from Bayboro, S.C., about three years ago. Her career plan fizzled, and she ended up working at Taco Bell restaurants. There she fell in with a group of young singles who shot baskets, cooked out and went to comedy clubs together. One of them was Henry Wallace. Another was Shawna Hawk. Police say Wallace strangled Hawk in February 1993, and Spain four months later. Spain was the youngest daughter of six children. Her parents, Broughton and Mae Helen Spain of Bayboro, called her “Baby” and remember her as a friendly youth who knew no strangers. Charlotte co-workers say the same. “She always liked to make you smile and laugh,” said Stephanie Cook, who worked with Spain at the Sharon Amity Taco Bell, where Spain was a shift manager. Cook got the news of her death from Wallace. “Guess what?” she remembers him saying. “You aren’t going to believe this. Audrey’s dead.” Spain’s parents took her body home to South Carolina. Her friends never heard about her funeral.

* Valencia M. Jumper Age: 21 Found: Aug. 10, 1993

Vanesa Jumper never believed that her younger sister, Valencia, would have failed to turn off the stove before falling asleep. But law enforcement officials told Valencia Jumper’s family last summer that she died of smoke inhalation during a fire in her home at Greenbryre Apartments, off Sharon Amity Road. Sunday, Vanesa Jumper found out she was right. Valencia was one of 10 victims police say were killed by Henry Louis Wallace. “Grieving is bad enough. Now seven months later, it’s hitting just as hard as when they called the first time,” Vanesa Jumper said Monday from her home in Columbia. “I know my sister. I know how we were raised. The last thing you do at night is you check your door and you check your stove.” The weekend before Valencia’s death, Vanesa had been visiting. “She cooked dinner and she unplugged everything. I know she was careful.” Valencia Jumper grew up in Columbia, the youngest of five children. She was a senior at Johnson C. Smith University, majoring in computer science. She was a good student, and worked two jobs, as a cashier at the Food Lion on Central Avenue and as a sales associate at Hecht’s. Vanesa Jumper said she became very good friends with Wallace’s sister when they attended Winthrop University in Rock Hill. She said Wallace introduced himself to Valencia Jumper in 1990 when he was a customer at the Food Lion.

* September 15, 1993 Michelle Denise Stinson Age: 20

Michelle Stinson was aiming for a career as a graphic artist, and doing well in classes at Central Piedmont Community College when she was found dead inside her Grier Heights apartment last fall. Frank Granger, her graphic arts instructor, said she once chose to do a project about managing stress and raising two children. Until then, he hadn’t understood why she would sometimes fall asleep in his class. After that, he admired her courage and determination. Stinson was making A’s and B’s in courses like desktop publishing, printing management, sculpture and water color. Then, a friend found her dead, facedown on the kitchen floor. Police said her two small sons, Ernee, 3, and Nashon, 1, were present when their mother was slain, stabbed to death. When the friend knocked, Ernee answered. “My mommy’s asleep on the floor,” he said. Henry Wallace has been charged with killing Stinson and nine other women. All the victims were black women. Many of them knew Wallace from their apartment complexes or their jobs in fast food restaurants. Police said, at the time of her death, that there was no sign of a struggle or forced entry, and the apartment did not appear to have been burglarized.

* Feb. 20, 1994 Vanessa Little Mack Age: 25

Friends say Vanessa Mack had a troubled childhood. And sometimes, she lost patience with her own two children. But she was trying to do better, said Barbara Rippy, who found Mack strangled with a towel in her home off Wilkinson Boulevard. Rippy, whose son is the father of Mack’s older daughter, Natara, 7, had come to Mack’s home to babysit for her baby, Natalia Little, now 5 months old. Rippy raised Natara until she was 4-1/2. Then, when Mack won custody of Natara, Rippy moved from Florida to Charlotte. “I was a mother to her . . . I used to tell her to watch who she associated with,” said Rippy. “We had our times, I’ll tell you that. . . . “ After Mack died, Rippy said Mack’s colleagues at Carolinas Medical Center told her Mack had often talked about how much Rippy had helped her. “I used to think she hated me. . . . But after she passed, I felt real good that she really appreciated me. . . . “ Mack’s sister, Leslie Little, had introduced Mack to Wallace in July 1993. Little and Wallace worked together at the Taco Bell on Sharon Amity Road. Eunice Stradford, Mack’s friend and supervisor, said Mack always showed concern toward patients. When one woman died a year ago, Stradford said Mack was especially saddened. She said: “Everybody I get close to, they die, Miss Eunice.”

* Brandi J. Henderson Age: 18 Found: March 9, 1994

Brandi June Henderson loved being a mother. At 18, she had set up house in a quiet apartment off Albemarle Road with her boyfriend and her 10-month-old son, Tareese Woods. “She was my Brandi, my little cuddly Brandi,” recalled her aunt, Dorothy Nance. “She was just a happy person, and she wanted me to be happy too.” Henderson’s early life wasn’t always easy. Her parents separated when she was 2, and she spent much of her childhood moving from house to house. Her aunt, Gale Burrell, said Henderson spent more time with her father than her mother. Lloyd Burris, who ran the children’s church at Gloryland Baptist Church, remembers her as a young teenager. “She was one of the sweetest kids I ever had in my program,” he said. “The main thing I remember about her is she hunted me up the second she hit that church.” Henderson dropped out of high school but then went back to Harding High to try to get her diploma. She also studied at Central Piedmont Community College. “I remember her being real sweet as she can be,” said Jo Henderson, Brandi’s cousin. “And I remember her with a bookbag on her back, going up to Harding High School.”

* Betty Baucum Age: 24 Found: March 10, 1994

Ten minutes into his interview with Betty Jean Baucum, Phil Locke knew she was the kind of person he wanted working as a manager at the Bojangles’ he ran on Central Avenue. “She had a lot of good qualities,” Locke said Monday. “She was a very nice young lady, a hard worker, dependable. She just had a beautiful smile. And I never heard her use one word of profanity, even if she got burned or something.” Locke hired Baucum on Sept. 20, 1993, as a management trainee. She became a co-manager at the store in November. A staff member at The Lake apartments on Albemarle Road found Baucum’s body in her apartment Thursday morning after her family called, worried that they hadn’t heard from her. Police said she had been strangled and dead for at least a day. Her car, believed to have been stolen, was found in a shopping center across the street from her apartment. Baucum was originally from Laurel Hill. Locke said she had recently asked about transferring to a new Bojangles’ in Sanford, so she could be closer to her fiance. They hadn’t talked about her plans in any detail, though. “She was fair and consistent in the way she handled people,” Locke said. “She was somebody who was a joy to be around,” Locke said.

* Debra Ann Slaughter Age: 35 Found: March 12, 1994

When Debra Slaughter’s mother unlocked her door and saw Slaughter lying on the floor, she didn’t panic. Slaughter had been suffering back pain and had an appointment with a chiropractor that day. Her mom assumed she’d stretched out to ease her back. But she was dead, a victim of killer Henry Louis Wallace, police said. Slaughter, a deli worker at the Morrocroft Harris Teeter, was the oldest of four children. Her family remembers her infectious laugh and beautiful voice singing in church choir. “We used to sit around and tell childhood stories and she would make us laugh,” recalls sister Linda Ball. “She was sort of a comedian.” Slaughter, who had an 18-year-old son living in Atlanta, moved into Glen Hollow apartments with her parents last year. They recently moved, leaving Slaughter alone. Police believe she, like most of the other victims, knew Wallace and let him in. The family doesn’t recall hearing about him, but Slaughter may have met him while working at Bojangles’ on Central Avenue. Wallace worked at several east Charlotte fast-food restaurants and met many of the victims there. Ball remembers her sister as a tall, strong woman. She wants to know more about the attack. “I want to know if she was fighting him,” Ball said.

Most of them lived or worked on the east side of town. Most were in their early 20s. Most were strangled.

All were black.

It wasn’t until the eighth black woman was strangled that homicide detectives saw a pattern.

Two more women would be murdered before police arrested someone – a man who was acquainted with almost all of the women.

Henry Louis Wallace had worked alongside some of them in restaurants. He had prior convictions and a warrant out for his arrest. Yet for nearly two years, Wallace slipped past the suspicion of Charlotte investigators.

His recent arrest relieved the people of North Carolina’s biggest city, but it also raised disturbing questions.

Why did it take police two years to notice similarities among the killings? Why did they miss the links between the women and Wallace? Most troubling, had the victims been white, would police have responded more quickly, more thoroughly?

“”It’s very easy to say in hindsight, “Why didn’t we go here?’ or “Why didn’t we go here?’ ” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Dennis Nowicki said last week. “”I’m almost certain that there was no deliberate failing.”

She calls them failings of omission and apathy, failings that she says reveal an underlying layer of racial discrimination. “”If those girls had been white, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Grier, who has lived here all her 42 years.

“”When those girls were getting killed, child after child after child, I could see a pattern on that. Just little old me. Anybody could see that. And we’re talking about police investigators here.”

“A zillion pieces’

Shawna Hawk was the tough baby who seemed to look her mother square in the eye minutes after she arrived in this world.

Shawna was the girl who, at 14, was so determined to bring home her own paycheck that she lied about her age to get a job draining french fries at McDonald’s.

She was the young woman studying to be a paralegal at community college while making ends meet on the overnight shift at Taco Bell.

Shawna’s father and mother had split up, leaving Shawna, now 20, and her mother, Dee Sumpter, on their own.

“”Do you see any flowers, any balloons, any cards, anything?” Sumpter answered.

“”Okay, yeah, I see what you mean,” Shawna told her mother. “”But you have me.”

As they switched off perming each other’s hair, Shawna reminded her mother where they had been a few years back: no home, no transportation, no work.

“”She said, “Now we’ve got a house of our own, two beat-up cars, and we just redecorated my room in purple. You’ve got no reason to cry,’ ” Sumpter remembered.

They agreed their next project would be to refinish Shawna’s falling-down wooden dresser.

Five days later, Sumpter came home and noticed a tube of wood glue on the living room couch. Shawna must have bought it for the refinishing job, she thought. She glanced at the VCR clock. It flashed 5:10 p.m.

The dinner hour came and went, still no Shawna. Sumpter started making calls. Shawna’s boyfriend stopped by to help. She heard him walk down the hall. Then she heard a scream. Call 911, he was yelling, please call 911.

Shawna was in the bathtub. She had been strangled.

Sumpter never went back to that house.

“”At that moment, you have to understand, life goes into a zillion pieces,” Sumpter said, her eyes losing focus, drifting toward the ceiling. “”Each time I reach for one of those pieces, they don’t fit. They’ll never fit again. Shawna was not just my child, she was my sister. She was my best friend.”

As weeks turned to months, Sumpter became impatient. The police focused on Shawna’s boyfriend, she said, and didn’t bother to interview Shawna’s co-workers at the Taco Bell. It took two months to find her missing car – which she said was in the parking lot at Shawna’s community college.

“”I started having some questions about what was going on,” Sumpter said. “”I’m not out on a witch hunt or a vengeance campaign. But it didn’t seem like they were doing everything they should.”

In line at a market one day, a man approached and offered her a word of sympathy and a warm hug. The memory chills her.

Years earlier, Sumpter met Henry Wallace when he picked up Shawna for a date. It was Wallace who had hired Shawna at Taco Bell. They went to a comedy club and had a pleasant time on their one and only date, Sumpter said.

“”He had nice manners,” Sumpter said. “”He was personable to the nth degree.”

The Night Rider

Wallace grew up in tiny Barnwell, S.C. He was a decent athlete and a smooth-talking, part-time disc jockey who called himself the “”Night Rider.”

He left for Washington State and the Navy but returned to South Carolina after he was caught breaking into a hardware store. Back home, a 16-year-old accused him of rape, and he was sent to a program for first-time offenders. He went to prison for stealing equipment from his old radio station.

The state of Washington, unaware Wallace was in prison, issued a warrant for his arrest for violating his probation.

Released from prison, Wallace moved one state north, and settled on the east side of Charlotte, near the Taco Bell where he found a job as an assistant manager.

Then the bodies started turning up.

The first woman had been beaten and left along a road in northwest Charlotte.

Two weeks later, Caroline Love was reported missing. Police chatted with Wallace about Love – not as a suspect, but because he dated her roommate. They checked Wallace’s local police record but found nothing, missing his convictions in other states and the arrest warrant from Washington.

Nearly a year later, Shawna Hawk was found in her home just west of downtown.

Then the killings grew closer together – in time and place. Four in eight months, concentrated on the east side, where the streets are lined with monotonous apartment complexes and fast-food joints.

Police say it’s not odd that they were unaware a serial murderer was at work after seven killings. Most victims were strangled, but one was beaten, another stabbed and strangled, and a third burned. Only later did they determine she also was strangled.

Leads in some cases, they said, pointed to other suspects. Wallace didn’t surface as a suspect until the eighth killing – Brandi Henderson.

The killer didn’t have to break into her apartment. Wallace, who was friends with Henderson’s live-in boyfriend, was one of several people she would have allowed inside.

The next day, in the same apartment complex, Betty Baucum was found. Police found Wallace’s fingerprint in her stolen car.

They were searching for Wallace two days later when the 10th body turned up. The next day, March 13, police found Wallace hiding at a friend’s house.

Police said he confessed to 10 murders in Charlotte and admitted strangling 18-year-old Tashanda Bethea in South Carolina in 1990. He is awaiting trial.

Wallace, 28, is Mecklenburg County Jail’s most notorious prisoner since Jim Bakker. Wallace the prisoner behaves like the man Sumpter remembers sending off on a date with her daughter.

“”He is cooperative,” said Chief Deputy Kenn Brown. “”He appears always to be in good spirit.”

“Hindsight is easy’

Four of the victims worked in the same fast-food restaurant. Another worked with Wallace at a different restaurant. Another lived with Wallace’s girlfriend.

Police missed those connections. Nowicki, recently named police chief, says it wasn’t for lack of trying. “”To see patterns in two or three murders in hindsight is easy,” he said. “”It was not as if this department discovered a pattern and kept it quiet. As soon as he was identified as a suspect, he was arrested.”

These were hardly Charlotte’s only killings. During the 22 months between the first and 10th murders, investigators handled 199 homicides.

“”I don’t get the sense that there are any large numbers of individuals who believe that the police did anything wrong,” Nowicki said. “”There were numerous leads presented, and the investigators pursued those leads until they were no longer viable.”

Black detectives were members of the homicide squad, Nowicki said, and the race of the victims played no role in the intensity of the investigation. “”That’s ridiculous. Pardon me, but that offends me, it offends my officers and it offends my community.”

Some black leaders are skeptical. “”It didn’t take a rocket scientist to say these killings had something in common,” said Herbert L. White, managing editor of the Charlotte Post, an 8,000-circulation weekly newspaper aimed at the black community.

White criticized police for overlooking the warrant for Wallace’s arrest when they questioned him in Love’s disappearance. “”They had him and they let him go,” said White. “”This, when they routinely run FBI checks on people for broken taillights.”

The investigation would have been more thorough, White said, had the dead women lived in south Charlotte, the mostly white section where gourmet coffee shops, joggers and oak trees line streets with names like Harvard Place, Queens Road and Ideal Way.

Assumptions got in the way, White contends. Too often, police presume that domestic disputes or drug activities are behind the murders of black people. Also, serial killers usually are white. If police had thrown away their preconceived notions, White said, they might have noticed what these women had in common: “”Apartments, fast-food restaurants and, I guess, Henry Wallace.”

People have grown accustomed to black people dying, he said. Last year, 94 of Charlotte’s record 122 murder victims were black.

“”In this society, black life comes cheap,” he said. “”It’s not just white people feeling that. There are some black people who feel that way. For whatever reason, when black people are killed, it’s not all that surprising.”

Blind to what we see

In the weeks after Wallace’s arrest, pressure mounted to investigate the police investigation.

All four black members of the 11-member City Council spoke in favor of an outside audit. “”It is difficult for a wife to testify against her husband,” said council member Ella Butler Scarborough. “”So it is with us when we have problems. It is very difficult for us to judge ourselves.”

But Nowicki cautioned that an investigation could jeopardize the case against Wallace.

The council voted 10-1 to reject an outside audit. “”We as a council have to be careful that we don’t start a trend in which we put our police on trial instead of the criminals,” Mayor Pro Tem Patrick McCrory concluded.

That may not be the final word.

Kelly Alexander, head of the state NAACP, says he will ask the U.S. Justice Department to review the police investigation. An objective look is needed, he said, because human beings can’t always see what’s right in front of them.

“”All of us have lost something that’s in plain sight,” Alexander said. “”A key ring, say, blends into whatever else is on your desk. For whatever reason, the mind fails in pattern-recognition.

“”If you look away, and then you come back, it’s right there. And then you wonder how you could have missed it.”

The memorial also honored Sharon Nance and Tashanda Bethea, two other women Wallace is charged with killing.

An extended family of nearly 100 turned out for the memorial. The jury and members of the district attorney’s office attended. So did ministers from various congregations, and others who felt the family members’ pain of losing a loved one to violence.

“It could have been my family,” said Angela Young, wearing the purple ribbon distributed at the service to symbolize nonviolence.

Family members read poems and spoke tributes through their tears. “She’s all I ever had,” cried Kathy Love, sister of Caroline Love.

Margie Spain, sister of Audrey Spain, urged families to value life more. “Love someone more than you would have. Share a positive word,” Spain said.

Family and friends repeatedly thanked members of the jury for attending at MOMO’s invitation.

“Through this, we also have suffered a loss,” jury foreman Robbie Grier told the audience. “Maybe we lost some of our innocence.”

last night i had a dream that mr wallace was after me and i got up and ran in the other room how scary to know that someone could take your life in a dream. i know those victims had to be scared how cruel could someone be to take someone elses life.i will tell this story to every young girl i know becareful because you may think you know someone and you really don’t i live off central ave and every time i pass those apartments i get chills.

I’m sorry to hear about the nightmare. HW was a terror and a nightmare to women in East Charlotte. I’m glad they put that man behind bars. But they should’ve executed him a long time ago in account of his heinous crimes and brutal murders of Black women from 1990-1994.

bubba was a smooth talker and can get anything he wanted. i grew up with this fool and he never was mistreated by his family. he trying to sucker yall so you will feel sorry for him. bubba had his moma brain washed that he could do no wrong but we knew better. i just want to know when they gonna cook his ass so we can be done with it!!! thats my cousin but his ass got to go!!!!!

If you would like, would you like to do a story on Brandi Henderson? She’s one of HLW’s youngest victims. I’d like to give her late cousin’s e-mail address to correspond with him soon. He corresponded me through e-mail last December:

“Hi, I am George Burrell, first cousin of Brandi Henderson. We share the same birthday, November 21st, but I am five years her senior. Are you LaReyna?? If so, did you know Brandi. I was on the phone with her the night Henry Wallace came to kill her (as documented in court testimony). She hung up with me to let him use the phone…her last words were, “Love ya.” Besides Wallace, I was honored to have been the last one to speak to her b/c she was my best friend in the entire world. Thank you for your memorial page. She was amazing.
Sincerely, George Burrell.”

Many remember Dee Sumpter’s darling daughter Shawna Denise Hawk as a murder victim of serial killer Henry Louis Wallace, but few people other than family and friends remember her as a very beautiful, smart and virtuous young woman. She was the second child and only daughter of Dee Sumpter and Walter Hawk II. She grew up to become a very beautiful, sweet, gentle, shy, saintly young woman with so much to offer. She and her beautiful mother are very tight with each other, for she shares her mother’s petite stature, very smooth skin, and very sparkling bright eyes. The ladies have a lot in common.

Mother and daughter were alone in Charlotte after her family split up in the early 1990s. Her brothers lived with their father, a high school principal in Atlanta back then while her older brother served in the military in Germany. Shawna and her mother lived in a two story apartment on Elon Avenue. Her mother used to work as a receptionist at a downtown Charlotte law firm back in the early 1990s. Now, Dee works as a receptionist at Calvary Church, a nondemonational church. Shawna attended college in the morning and worked at Taco Bell at night, paying for her college tuition at a local community college. She was studying to be a paralegal, which was a very popular profession and I’m sure she would have been a very successful lawyer as well, for she was very intelligent and have a passion for justice. She also want to have a child as well. Her ambitions and dreams were cut short by someone she knew and trust. His name is the nortorious serial killer Henry Louis Wallace.

Henry Wallace arrived in Charlotte from Barnwell, S.C. in late 1991. He found jobs at various restaurants in East Charlotte, then a thriving area with then-prosperous Eastland Mall. It’s now a declining area with empty storefronts, dilapidated apartments and a dying mall. Mr. Wallace’s charm helped him make friends easily. Beneath the charm hides a misogynistic streak but he never showed it when he was around people in public. His private life is another matter I don’t want to talk about. He’s an evil man. I hate the fact that he was once her boss at Taco Bell in East Charlotte. He confessed to killing another co-worker.

Short though it was, she had a good life. Not the kind of things you win awards for, but little behind-the-scenes type things that meant something to everyone she touched.“ Hawk met Kirkpatrick on the set of “Can You Help My Child?“ He is an actor in the drama, which focuses awareness on drugs and violence in inner cities. Sumpter was doing publicity for the singers in the play, and Shawna used to help out with odd jobs. Sumpter introduced Darrell Kirkpatrick to her daughter in late 1992. The couple had been dating just over a month before her tragic death in 1993. “She was never trying to be somebody else, just always herself…She was sweet, and had a real good sense of humor. We had a lot of quality time together

Shawna loves children and was a protector as well. Shawna spent a great deal of time taking care of her godson, Jermond Williams, 2. Jermond`s mother, Tasha Williams, and Hawk met when both were students at East Mecklenburg High School and worked part time at McDonald`s. Jermond had spent the night at Hawk`s house, and Hawk had planned to pick him and Williams up at the day care center about 3 p.m. She never came. “Jermond`s been asking about her. They were real close, she loved him a lot. And he used to talk to her every night on the phone. I don`t think he really knows yet that something`s wrong.” according to Shawna’s best friend. A month before her untimely passing, she was babysitting her neighbor’s daughter whose house was broken into while alone one January afternoon. Her parents filed a report with the police. The police didn’t follow through the report. It turned to be none other than the nortorious evil serial killer Henry Louis Wallace, who took advantage of police indifference to neighborhoods of color and who always displayed his gentlemanly demeanor in public. Shawna and her mother stepped up the plate and kept her safe in their house until her parents arrived.

He betrayed Miss Hawk’s trust, innocence, and kindness by assaulting and killing her on the afternoon of February 19, 1993. Mr. Wallace have the audacity and the nerve to attend her funeral like nothing ever happened. He also attended funerals of victims Valencia Jumper and Vannessa Mack. How two-faced and evil he is. It wasn’t until March 1994 when he confessed to the police of killing Shawna Hawk along with nine other young Black women in Charlotte between 1992 and March 1994.

Shawna’s family and her godmother Judy Williams founded Mothers of Murdered Offspring. The organization is dedicated to parents of murdered victims and it’s still going strong today. The organization arrange vigils, funerals offer counseling for parents and loved ones of murder victims.

Shawna was nicknamed “The Purple Princess” because her favorite color was purple, a favorite of royality and was adopted by Mothers of Murdered Offspring to represent nonviolence.

I knew wallace when he was in the navy stationed on the uss nimitz v-2 division and weapons department bremerton washington . he was know to flirt with other sailor’s wive’s and show at their at their house when the husband had 24 hour duty and could not leave the ship, including my own wife this was in 1987-1988 time frame and I called him A friend before he came to my house when I had 24 hour duty to visit my wife.She did not let him in !!!thank god. the last time I saw him was the night he shipped of the the Nimitz to be discharged from the service he snuck into my berthing (sleeping quater’s)grabed me from my bottom bunk while I was sleeping, dragged me across the floor spent me in circles on the floor and took of in the night laughing along the way. and that was last time I saw Him. nothing fond to remember,just thankful to know god was wathing out for my wife and the other Sailor’s wive’s he could have did something to while wallacewas in the navy

That was disgusting and evil what he did to the sailors’ wives and girlfriends. He had a violent streak in him despite his outward appearance as a gentleman. He really had problems with women in general. I’m glad Mr. Wallace got the death penalty for good. Serves him right.

Thank you all for keeping memories of Brandi alive. It means the world to me. Some say that time heals all wounds. I’m sure time may help close them – but, heal them?- I beg to differ after this experience. It’s been well over 15 years since her death and I’ve accepted that the healing is everlasting. I still search to forgive myself for not going over to her house when she asked me that night she died. While we were on the phone I heard someone knock at her door. She let the person in. After I declined to come over she hung up the phone to let that “someone” use it to call her boyfriend…that someone turned out to be Henry Louis Wallace. I wonder if i could have saved her or if i would have been his victim also. It still haunts me that the next day i watched the news of her murder with him and my neighbor Kevin. His tap on my shoulder to say he was sorry for my loss. His cold lifeless eyes glaring into mine. I knew then it was him but the police brushed me off when i went to them and asked to go check him out. He was right there around the corner from them I’ll never forget that day.

Sharon Nance was my cousin. My sister and her were very close and inseparable. So when she went missing she knew something was wrong. They were together the night before she went missing and it still bothers my sister today. We need to keep all these ladies in our memory, so that we never forget the MONSTER that walked the streets of Charlotte.

I also encountered Henry Wallace
and he was a vert intelligent man
he was very nice and considerate
I use to work at bojangles on central. i use to sit and talk to
him face to face. it was always pleasant. i often wonder was he ever thinking about killing me.

I’m sorry to hear about your loss of your beautiful cousin. It’s sad that her life ended in tragedy. It’s also sad that the media didn’t value her serious as the other nine victims. She didn’t even get a trial and that’s not right.

I was hoping to see a photo of Sharaon Nance. Sharon was a good and dear friend. She like many of us made some poor choices in life ( as did I ), ut was a friendly and highy educated young woman who is missed very much. I was longing to see her face again as time has faded my memories.

I remember moving next to the Jumper family in 1989 here in Columbia, SC. At the time Valencia M. Jumper was attending Columbia High. I was just a year older than her, and remeber always seeing her coming home from school riding in her red nissan sentra. I even remember the day she went to her senior prom. That following Fall she started attending Johnson C Smith in Charlotte NC. Year after year i would either be cutting the grass on a friday or saturday and i would see Valencia coming down the hill, coming home from school for the weekend. I heard she was working and of course attending school. She was doing well for herself as a college student away from home. Then one Satruday morning we (my famil & I) woke up to see alot of cars in front of our house and the Jumpers house and all across the street. They were there for awhile. My mom called another neighbor to see what was going on. We got some news that we was not expecting. We were told that Mr. Mrs Jumper youngest child Valencia died in a house fire in charlotte NC. At that time we were told it was an accident. I believe a few months later or a year i can’t remember we learned it was not a accident and the pain started all over again..Our hearts went out to the Jumper family during their time of sorrow. After the death of her daughter i rarly seen Mrs Jumper again. I moved from next door to them in 1997. Hope the family is in good spirits and the life of there daughter will live on in our memories…

Here’s an opinion article from Charlotte’s Creative Loafing, an alternative newspaper on HW:
__________________________________
Serial killer benefited from racial bias
August 11th, 2010 by John Grooms in Boomer with Attitude
Irony seems to be in the very air we breathe these days. The latest example of irony piling on top of irony is the case of Henry Louis Wallace, the Charlotte serial killer who, between 1992 and 1994, killed nine young African-American women in the city. Most of Wallace’s victims were raped and strangled. He was sent to death row. Wallace is now one of 119 death row inmates who are seeking to have their death sentences converted to life without parole under the relatively new Racial Justice Act. Wallace is saying that racial bias was involved in his sentencing to be executed.

I don’t know Wallace, and I don’t know the judge who sentenced him. What I do know is that people who have little money, a majority of them African-Americans, are the ones who wind up on death row. That’s unjust and it stinks and should not happen, etc., etc., which is why we have a law like the Racial Justice Act. Wallace may or may not have a case, based on the statistical evidence that blacks are sentenced to death at a much higher rate than whites (or at least non-poor whites). BUT, the guy killed nine women, for God’s sake, most of whom he raped and strangled. If anyone deserves the death penalty – and that is a big, big if, better discussed another time – it’s Henry Louis Wallace. OK, so an African-American man who killed nine African-American women says the judge was racially biased; score 1 for irony.

The real, and more tragic, irony, however, is that racial bias, or at least unconcern, was the main reason it took police over a year to realize they had a serial killer on their hands. Some young black women were killed over a period of time, and the police’s attitude was, essentially, “So what else is new?” The victims weren’t white cheerleaders or A students from posh neighborhoods, so no one noticed any connections between the cases for a long time. In other words, in Wallace’s case, if racial bias, or at least racial blinders, hadn’t been at work, the serial killer would no doubt have been caught sooner, and at least a few young women’s lives would have been saved. That is how racial bias had an effect on the Henry Louis Wallace case. His lawyers must have more gall than the rest of the state’s population combined.
____________________
La Reyna

I’m very sorry to hear about your neighbor’s death. It makes me sick to my stomach to read about HW attending Valencia’s funeral as if nothing happened. That’s disgusts me. What really disgusts me is that the police, fire, and the medical examiner didn’t thoroughly investigated the fire in which Miss Valencia already died that night, which should have been ruled as arson as well as the manner in which she died. The ME knew that she didn’t died from smoke inhalation. She died from strangulation and that someone set the fire to her apartment to cover up the crime. I wished her family sue the medical examiner for not investigating Miss Valencia’s death thoroughly.

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